


Deviation #5

by JayBarou



Series: Things that could have been Different in Endgame [4]
Category: The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-29
Updated: 2019-04-29
Packaged: 2020-02-09 12:44:31
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,479
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18638389
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JayBarou/pseuds/JayBarou
Summary: The one where Nebula has unfixed issues.





	Deviation #5

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Bat_Gargoyle](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bat_Gargoyle/gifts).



> Thank you for the suggestion, Bat_Gargoyle. I hope it helps. I loved writing it.

 

Tony jumped when a heap of metal and living tissue hit his improvised worktable. “I need you to fix me.”

“Fix… you.” Tony took a moment to still his beating heart and glare at Nebula. 

“Yes.” She left by his feet an additional bucket of scraps that looked mostly new.

Tony looked again at the bionic body on his worktable and his eyes went big and round. He looked at Nebula, and back at dead Nebula. 

“I’m... Sorry. What happened to her?” He went to inspect the entrance wound immediately, but he didn’t know where to put his hands or if he should. 

“I shot her.”

His hands stopped while his own brain took a moment to short-circuit.

“You shot her,” he said slowly and trying to keep any feeling from the statement.

Nebula got rigid and defensive again.

“You have no room to judge, Stark,” she growled. “I’m not the only one who killed herself today.”

“And yet here we are,” he said with all the good humor he could muster. 

She was only mildly appeased and he went on to explore her inner workings, just visually exploring for the moment. He noticed a vital module, it was active.

“She is… She is alive.”

“I said fix, not create, so of course she is.” Nebula crossed her arms. “Nobody knows my engines better than I do. I aimed to shoot her down, and my aim is-”

“As good as a targeting system, of course,” Tony finished absent-mindedly.

After almost two minutes bent over the scorched wound, Tony stopped what he was doing and looked up. 

“Wait a minute. You said it: ‘Nobody knows my engines better than I do’. What am I doing here exactly? You know far better than I do what to do with your body.” He threw his hands into the air. “Rocket probably knows what to do and has the advantage of smaller hands to manage the small pieces, I could even call Shuri and…”

“No!” She stamped her hands on the worktable. “It has to be you.”

“It has to be me.” Tony finally noticed the nervous trembling of her arms that wasn’t quite anger. 

He looked at the body again. He could recognize the system that kept her basically on standby until the body could be autonomous again, the pieces, but for a moment he had lost sight of what was Nebula’s corpse, for all intents and purposes.

“Why don’t you sit on this chair?” Tony pushed her to sit on what used to be a wall of the compound.

“But it has to be you. I saw you.”

“It will be me, Nebula. Don’t worry, I just want you to be riiiight here.” He guided her so she was facing away from the worktable. He put his arms on her shoulders, but she flinched, so he just walked in front of her to see her face. 

“Since you passed all your advanced cyborg-anatomy classes and I didn’t, why don’t you help me out? Guide me. It will be faster.” And it had the added bonus of making her think about something else than her body on the table. Okay, it was still her body, but different. It would help her to focus, probably.

“The chest piece has five latches,” she started brusquely but already more centered. “You’ll have to take that off first.”

“Good, wait. Let me make sense of the bucket of spares. You tell me the name of each piece so I don’t end up using a Klubbo in the B slot.”

That was easy. They fell into the dynamic they had created while surviving in the Milano. It was a strange companionship, but Tony had been talking to sentient and not sentient machines for a long time. Some kiddo who had been forcibly pushed out of humanity was not that far off. It was like working a system with a virus and having to quarantine some topics to avoid the virus from spreading. It was like most teenagers, as far as he was aware. Oh, he was looking forward to the day Morgan was a teenager because he had been so close to never seeing it…

“Tell me, why are we repairing you?”

“I need you to repair me, and install a copy of my memories until 2014 so we can send her back-” 

“...and heal the time rift,” he interrupted.”I know that part. Strange is sending the ashes of Thanos et al. back. He says the time stone will do,” he finger quoted: “what needs to be done. Something about the stone from 2012 and the one from 2014 harmonizing with the Ancient One to align the paradoxes next to the timeline. Am I the only one who thinks Strange makes these things up on the go? But what I mean is: why not sending her off with the ashes as it is. Time would do the same to her, don’t you think?”

“We won’t risk it. I don’t want her to have any memories of this.” She snapped, and Tony could see why. He was worried too. Nobody really knew how time worked, he wasn’t sure Stephen really knew what he was doing. He was the expert, but he had been a Sorcerer for such a short time… And there was a Loki out there with the Tesseract, wasn’t there? Should they be worried? Or would time sweep that under the cosmic rug too?

Shortly after they were done with the names, Tony opened Nebula’s chest piece and only held back the comments about the way he took people apart with his hands in other contexts because it was Nebula. So instead he latched on to the other thing that had made him curious.

“There you are. Don’t pinch me and I won’t pinch… good. So, Nebula, why do you want me to do this?” He disconnected all the damaged parts sequentially as Nebula had said.

“It has to be you.” She was once again on the verge of a growl.

“I am! I am doing it, but Ratchet and Clank is a good engineer and knows his way around an ion flux microchip. So why me?”

“I saw you in the ship, working on the engines. I have never seen Rocket talk to his engines, only to insult them when they malfunction, but not…”

Tony slowed down. He wouldn’t forgive himself if he dropped the delicate Romulanian Transdutor now.

“Not like you do. You care. And I couldn’t do it myself, not like that. It had to be you.”

Tony left the piece next to the body and sat down next to Nebula but facing the table. 

For a few minutes, he had thought Nebula couldn’t do it herself because it was her own body, but it wasn’t that simple, was it? She was not squeamish or unnerved by her almost-corpse, no. She didn’t want to be fixed, she wanted someone to look after her, someone to care for her in a way she could accept. 

Tony didn’t know what to do with himself. He would have offered a hug, or a beer, or a pat, or simply a look, but Nebula wouldn’t accept those. She could hardly understand such blunt affection, but she craved it, maybe instinctively.

He sighed and got up again, picking one of the burnt wires and handing it to her. “This little guy won’t give you any more trouble. Keep an eye on it while I put the Transductor in.”

They went quiet for a few minutes, only broken by Tony’s muttering to the pieces, slightly more vocal than usual.

“I don’t know if you should see Wilson for veteran therapy or a civil therapist, does this qualify as a suicide tentative, you think?” He asked her when the most urgent parts were installed.

“No, Stark, I do not require that kind of fix, I was aiming to maim, not kill,” she stated bluntly. 

“ _Aim to maim_ , that would be a fantastic name for your band.”

“What band?” Her confusion amused Tony, but he wouldn’t admit it in a million years.

“I don’t know, but I’d go to the concerts. I bet you would look great creating something with electronic and heavy metal.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Music, Nebula. Do you play any space-instrument?”

“I can reproduce music.”

Tony blinked. He was tempted to put one of her nails on an Elvis vinyl and ask her to open her mouth.

“I’ll have to show you a couple of human instruments. We were thinking of teaching Morgan to play the piano. I was on my way to find a way of playing ACDC on it.”

Wasn’t music therapeutic? He had heard something like that. Once they dealt with the reboot of Nebula 1.0 he would look into it a bit more. Everyone would need therapy after this one.

**Author's Note:**

> I accept suggestions for more Alternate Endgame ficlets.


End file.
